Pocket notebook sighting

What’s this? The screenwriter is asleep in his bungalow? With nothing much by his typewriter? Well, maybe he’s got something in his notebook. Take a look, Mr. Producer. And please, start at the back for dramatic effect.

[Kirk Douglas as Jonathan Shields, Dick Powell as James Lee Bartlow, in The Bad and the Beautiful (dir. Vincent Minnelli, 1952). Click any image for a larger view.]

There are different guesses about who’s based on whom. The playwright Paul Eliot Green has been suggested as a model for the Southern academic and novelist James Lee Bartlow. But Green did most of his Hollywood work in the early 1930s. I think William Faulkner, who worked on and off in Hollywood from the early ’30s to the late ’50s, is a more recognizable choice.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

I am not that guy

Another e-mail arrived for a man of medicine who bears my name. As I wrote in a previous post about “Dr. Michael Leddy,” I’ve received everything from booking information to receipts for garden equipment, all meant for him. Another such e-mail arrived yesterday. I began reading:

You don’t know me, but I work with [name] on [street address]. I’ve been working with him to help bring in more erectile dysfunction and vasectomy patients to his practice.

I wrote back:

I frequently get e-mails for some guy with my name. But I am not that guy. And believe me, no one in his right mind would want me to perform a vasectomy on him, even if I work cheap. And I can’t do a thing for ED. Please remove my name from your mailings.

And then I realized I hadn’t read far enough:

I did some research into your practice and identified a few opportunities to drive in more patients for shoulder replacement to the practice.

Oh. So I wrote back again:

Nix to the shoulders too.

Related posts
Dr. Leddy, practicing : On the honorific “Doctor”

[I too am “Dr. Michael Leddy,” possessor of a doctorate. But as I always told my students, I preferred “Mr. Leddy” — good enough for my dad, good enough for me.]

“Grammar-Nerd Heaven”

Mary Norris writes about Taming the Tongue in the Heyday of English Grammar (1713-1851), an exhibition of grammars from Bryan Garner’s collection. “To enter the exhibit,” Norris writes, “is to climb aboard the Grammarama ride at Disneyland for Nerds.”

I have to point out: Norris, who says that it’s difficult not to mythologize Garner, does some mythologizing herself. As a fourth-grader, Garner did not bring a Webster’s Third to school to settle a question with a teacher. He availed himself of the Webster’s Third in the classroom. The question was whether shan’t is a word. Garner tells the story in an essay about shall.

Here’s an OCA earlier post about the exhibit.

Grammar or logic

The Baron de Charlus:

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

It’s one of the moments — there are many — in which M. Charlus’s confident lunacy makes me fast-forward to Ignatius J. Reilly.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Meta Raft

From Johnny Allegro (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). Criminal mastermind and crazed aesthete Morgan Vallin (George Macready) thinks that ex-con Johnny Allegro (George Raft) is still the hoodlum of old newspaper photographs. “I’ve changed a lot since then,” Allegro tells him.

“But your type never changes. Just looking at you makes me think of alley fighting, tommy guns.”

“Is that bad?”

I guess not, not if you’re George Raft.

On all three counts

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Derek Chauvin has been found guilty on all three counts.

[Our household, too, just rose for the jury as they left the courtroom.]

Heather Cox Richardson’s latest

In the April 19 installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson writes about gun violence, Brown v. Board of Education, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and cowboys, real and imaginary.

Letters from an American is invaluable. Also free.

Walter Mondale (1928–2021)

The New York Times has a lengthy obituary.

I remember riding in an elevator in 1984 with a clean-cut collegian wearing an orange button on his jacket. In black letters on an orange background: FRITZ IS A WIMP. I think that moment must have been my first awareness of toxic masculinity at work in politics.

*

Here, from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, is a transcript of a Reagan speech from October 1984, with the crowd chanting the words on the button.

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Treasure Island (dir. Victor Fleming, 1934). I hadn’t seen this film since boyhood and did not remember how genuinely good it is. Jackie Cooper as young Jim Hawkins is a great asset here: listen to his voice and you’ll hear him as a plaintive boy version of Shirley Temple. But it’s the pirates that make the movie, a collection of grotesques, above all, Lionel Barrymore’s delirious Billy Bones and Wallace Beery’s conniving Long John Silver. Were Robert Louis Stevenson and Victor Fleming, like Blake’s Milton, of the Devil’s party without knowing it? ★★★★

*

Johnny Allegro (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). As a florist, George Raft is John Allegro (yes, George Raft, a florist). But as a fellow with a criminal past, he’s Johnny. His past gets him entangled in a criminal enterprise with the desirable Glenda Chapman (Nina Foch) and the unhinged Morgan Vallin (George Macready). Foch and Macready, the one understated, the other over the top, help to compensate for Raft’s trademark stiffness. ★★★

*

Two by Vincent Minnelli

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). A movie producer (Walter Pidgeon) conducts a Socratic dialogue about exploitative movie producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) with three of the people whose lives Shields ruined: an actress (Lana Turner), a director (Barry Sullivan), and a writer (Dick Powell). Or were they ruined? Great acting, great storytelling via flashbacks, great black and white cinematography by Robert Surtees, a great score by David Raksin, and Gloria Grahame in an Academy Award-winning performance as a southern lady. It’s “the movies,” and even in 2021, it’s fairly easy to figure out at least some of the real-life models for the characters. ★★★★

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). Not a sequel but a companion, with Douglas as a washed-up actor and Edward G. Robinson as a washed-up director, each holding on to meager career prospects in Rome. Cyd Charisse, George Hamilton, Dahlia Lavi, and Claire Trevor complicate the actor-director dynamic. I prefer the sharp and snappy 1952 world; too many outbursts make this movie campy by comparison. Best scene: Douglas’s character watching “himself” in The Bad and the Beautiful; worst: the car. ★★★

*

Salesman (dir. Albert Maysles and David Maysles, 1969). Four salesmen — the Badger, the Gipper, the Rabbit, and the Bull — travel from door to door (“I’m from the church”), pushing enormous illustrated Bibles on Catholic households. There’s something hilarious and repulsive about the use of the most hackneyed, high-pressure sales tactics to push these behemoths ($49.95 for the base model, $357.97 in today’s money) on households of modest means. And there’s something immensely sad about this documentary, particularly in the person of the bitter, hapless, wise-cracking monologist Paul Brennan, the Badger, who emerges as the star. Best and worst scene: Charles McDevitt, the Gipper, trying to “spark up” the Badger. ★★★★

*

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life (dir. Ric Burns, 2020). I’m a fan: I admire the neurologist Oliver Sacks for his eccentric humanity and his ability to identify with and celebrate the humanity of others. This documentary is a fan too, a beautifully made account of Sacks’s life, made in the last months of his life. Anyone who knows Sacks only as a writer of curious case histories (or as the doctor played by Robin Williams in Awakenings) will learn of his painful family background (a schizophrenic brother, a mother who calls Oliver an “abomination” when she learns he’s gay), drug use, frequent professional rejection, profound shyness, and, in the end, a six-year loving relationship with a partner. In lieu of a fourth sentence, I’ll point the reader to a short essay Sacks wrote for The New York Times after receiving a terminal diagnosis: “My Own Life.” ★★★★

*

The Mark (dir. Guy Green, 1961). A compassionate, deeply unnerving (because compassionate) portrait of a man who’s served time for “child seduction,” now attempting to make a new life for himself. Jim Fuller (Stuart Whitman) is an American in Manchester, England, working in accountancy thanks to a benevolent boss and a group that helps released prisoners. Complications develop when he begins a relationship with the firm’s secretary (Maria Schell). Rod Steiger, blessedly understated here, plays the psychiatrist who serves as Fuller’s lifeline. ★★★★

*

Two by Joseph Losey

The Servant (1963). From a novel by Robin Maugham, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. A drama of host and parasite, with a manservant (Dirk Bogarde) taking over the household of a boozy aristocrat (James Fox). Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig provide various forms of support. One of the darkest films I’ve seen. ★★★★

Accident (1967). From a novel by Nicholas Mosley, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. Silences, miscues, non sequiturs, and ominous tension, with an Oxford philosophy prof (Dirk Bogarde), an academic rival (Stanley Baker), and an aristocratic student (Michael York) all under the spell of an Austrian student and princess (Jacqueline Sassard). But it would be misleading to say that the movie is “about” that. Better, perhaps: it’s about the ways in which people step on one another, figuratively and literally. ★★★★

*

FBI Girl (dir. William A. Berke, 1951). Cesar Romero and George Brent star as agents investigating the murder of an FBI clerk; Audrey Totter is the late clerk’s roommate; and Raymond Burr lurks as a sinister figure on the payroll of a shady governor. So far so good, but this movie has nothing compelling in its action. Just wait for the scene in which the characters watch TV (and look for a young Peter Marshall on the small screen). This movie puts the udg in low-budget. ★

*

Little Caesar (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1931). The rise and fall of Caesar Enrico Bandello (Edward G. Robinson), a small-time hood determined to be “somebody.” Robinson is great, of course. I paid attention to the movie’s atmosphere: the lonely diner, serving spaghetti and coffee at midnight; the enormous interiors, some modernist, some weirdly baroque. And I was impressed by the economy and speed of the storytelling: a car, filmed from a distance, pulls up at a gas station, the doors open, the station’s lights go out, shots are fired, a cash register dings — and then we’re having spaghetti and coffee. ★★★★

*

That’s Life! (dir. Blake Edwards, 1986). Featured in the Criterion Channel’s collection Close to Home: How to Make a Movie Without Leaving the House — here, the house of Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, filled with glitzy people, some played by family members, all gathering for a birthday party. Andrews plays a singer married to the birthday boy, a kvetching architect about to turn sixty (Jack Lemmon almost parodying Jack Lemmon). Sex jokes, prostate jokes, and bowel jokes are all on the menu. Andrews’s character’s stoicism as she waits through a weekend for biopsy results was, for me, the movie’s one virtue. ★★

[Sources: the Criterion Channel, PBS, TCM, and YouTube.]

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

“Too small”

Jerry Blackwell, Special Assistant Attorney General, in his final words for the prosecution in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial, speaking of the defense’s greatest shading of the truth or departure from the evidence:

“You were told, for example, that Mr. Floyd died, that Mr. Floyd died because his heart was too big. You heard that testimony. And now having seen all the evidence, having heard all the evidence, you know the truth. And the truth of the matter is that the reason George Floyd is dead is because Mr. Chauvin’s heart was too small.”

The prosecution has done an excellent job of making its case with memorable bits of language: “calling the police on the police,” “let up or get up,” “common sense” and “nonsense,” and this final contrast.

You can hear these final words at C-SPAN, at the 6:42:13 mark.